Optical fibers are almost exclusively jacketed with one of twelve colors during the cabling process where multiple optical fibers are bundled together. These colors provide easy identification for splicing or other processing of the fibers, but the limited color palette may lead to inefficiencies. Foremost among these is that cable diameters must grow rapidly as fibers are bundled in (relatively coarse) powers of twelve. Most of the cable size is determined by the hard plastic jackets and the support rods with the fibers themselves contributing far less than half the volume. Increasing the number of fibers per cable would result in a significant cost saving.
Unfortunately, splicing of the fibers is a mostly human task and the human ability to discern (to a high confidence) multiple colors in a bundle is limited. Zero errors are tolerated and color confusion grows geometrically with the number of colors over twelve. Traditional portable colorimeters can be used to track coating process accuracy on fiber reels, but these do not have the spatial resolution to track individual fibers.